Rainforest

Right now you are having trouble understanding this material because perhaps, all your life you have been taught only one possible explanation of what the self is. I want to applaud your efforts now to try to learn a new understanding. I realize that this is not easy and you have come up with some good questions.

Let me use this analogy to try to paint an alternative picture for you: you probably know what a rainforest is. You can look on a map and see the location of a rainforest in some tropical local if you wish to. But what is a rain forest? Yes, for literary convenience we have a definition of what a rain forest is, but this doesn’t truly explain it.

If you look into the rain forest you will find an almost infinite amount of life there. Not just an incredible number of plants and animals each contributing their parts to the “creation” and maintenance of the rainforest, but also microscopic life and climatic elements each playing their specialized role that makes that forest a living thing.

The snake in the forest can choose to chase the mouse or the hair when it is confronted with the possibility of having either one for its dinner. And the parrot can choose to build its nest in one tree instead of another. So we know that freedom for choice exists in this forest.

If we try to actually define what this forest is, however, the task would impossible. To try to generate an inventory and categorization of all the different species within that forest that make it up; to quantify their populations; to identify all the different microorganisms; to understand how changes in birth and death and evolution would affect this vast catalog of data; all this would be an impossibility. Our definition would have to be reworked moment to moment. It could not be static, but an ever-changing system.

And yet the rainforest does exist. Generally speaking, its borders can be identified and an approximation of its size estimated fairly well. And if you were to go into this tropical rainforest, you would find that it has a personality different from a forest of redwoods in northern California or from the Black Forest in Germany.

With this analogy I have been trying to show you an example of a system, a living system, which is a conglomeration of many constantly changing elements, which exhibits freedom to choose when the opportunity for choice arises. A system whose very existence depends on the reality that it is ever-changing, for it is the activity within it (and outside it) that keeps it going.

Nevertheless, if we were to look at what is deep inside the plants and rocks and living creatures we would find the same game going on within each of them. They are all composed of matter, atoms made up of charges of energy rotating around other charges of energy. And incidentally these bits of energy are not solid objects either. In other words, each atom has a lot of emptiness within it.